There are many “patterns” in the SharePoint work that I do. Repeatable processes that change little from client to client. One of my favorite patterns is the “Blog Host”. A site collection that contains many blog sites. Like many of our favorite blog locations, our corporate customers have fairly straight forward requirements for their blog sites. Whether you plan to use the vanilla blog site out of the box or spruce things up a bit with the Community Kit for SharePoint® Enhanced Blog Edition ([CKS:EBE](http://www. Read More →

If you have been testing Community Kit SharePoint: Enhanced blog Edition you may have found that, once enabled you cannot edit files in the master page gallery. You get this error: Vince has posted a patch on the CKS site. Worked for me! Read More →

One of the indispensible tools that use for changing the CSS and “fixing” problems on a SharePoint site is the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar. There a many articles on how to use this tool. I wanted to point out that specifically for SharePoint this is a great tool for determining how and why a style sheet is behaving or misbehaving. Recently I was asked why the keywords and best bets web part stayed 230px wide when dragged into a different web part zone. Read More →

Real World SharePoint 2007: Indispensable Experiences From 16 MOSS and WSS MVPs What happens when a groups of MVPs get together and write a book about the good and bad of a product like SharePoint? You get a valuable resource and a good read! Unlike some “committee” books, this one is skillfully edited by Scot Hillier to maintain the tone of a single voice without losing the individuality of each author. Read More →

I have been doing some house cleaning today. This is the dialog from my copy of a VPC from one disk to another. That’s 134 years, 23 days and 7 hours. Time to reboot! Read More →

I have been learning a lot about CSS and XHTML. One of my first challenges was simply getting SharePoint Designer to use XHTML Strict as the default. Turns out the smarties at Microsoft already thought of this. Here’s how to set the default document type for your pages. Read More →

Those who know me, know that I am a keyboard and short cut junkie. Here is a faster way to blog from Word. Create a shortcut with the following command: "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\WINWORD.EXE" /t"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Templates\1033\Blog.dotx" Now you can create a blog article from Word without creating a document first! Back to work! Read More →

The infrastructure team has begun some testing on the Exchange 2007 migration. My mailbox was moved the other night and this is what I have noticed. The Process When the guys moved my mailbox I had to be offline for the move. They tested the migration and let me connect. Outlook had no issues or changes required. My phone detected the change and performed a complete resynchronization. My OWA address changed, we’re running 2003 and 2007 in parallel There is a known issue with Communicator that causes it to issue a login prompt from time to time, this has apparently been resolved though Visual Scheduling You can now see the text of your appointments in the scheduler. Read More →

We have several cases where IE and Office crash when connected to SharePoint sites. Usually related to document editing, saving, etc. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/833714 speaks to the issue. The solution that we have found to work most often is the “reinstall SharePoint components” option. Read More →

I have always said that the choice of the site template is one of the most important choices that you make for your client. Case in Point: After struggling with the “Publishing Portal” template, I recently chose to use the “Collaboration Portal” template for a site that is going to be internet facing. I began testing Anonymous access last week and (to my dismay) discovered that the Anonymous user had access to areas of the site like “pages/forms/allitems. Read More →